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Gambling is both a way to burn off extra gold and a way to improve your character's equipment. While most long term equipment needs will be met by runewords, uniques, and sets, gambling can be a very good way to upgrade a new character's equipment, and to score high quality rare armor and weapons.

Gambling can provide set and unique items too, though the odds of rolling them are very long, and the odds of gambling any particular exceptional or elite set/unique item are astronomical.

Buying everything in a gambling screen does not improve the odds of getting higher quality items. There was a bug in early versions of Diablo II that made one item on every gambling page unique, but this was fixed in a patch long ago.

The items available on a gamble screen reset as soon as the screen is closed. Most players load the gambling screen repeatedly when looking for specific item types.

The item types offered to gamble for are determined by your character's level, but only in that higher level characters get more item types offered to them. This only matters to low and mid-level characters, and every type of item is available after Clvl 55.

Items offered on the gambling screen are randomly determined, with one exception. There is always one amulet and one ring.

The prices for gambled items steadily increase as a character's level increases, with one exception. Rings are always 50,000 and amulets are always 63,000.

One NPC in each town has a gambling option on their interface. It does not matter which NPC you gamble with, or on which difficulty level you do your gambling. The odds are the same with all of them, and are determined entirely by your character's level. Nothing else matters: not the number of players in the game, or the difficulty level, or your magic find, etc.

The only thing that affects gambling are items (such as Gheed's Fortune, an Unique Charm) that lower the prices charged by vendors. And those only help by letting you gamble more items with the same amount of money.

There is no fixed answer to this, since it depends on what you're trying to gamble. As characters increase in level more types of items are offered (see the table below) and more Modifers become available. This is good and bad; good if you're after higher level affixes, bad since more possible affixes mean lower odds for each one to appear.

If you're after a specific modifier, or group of modifiers, you'll want to compare the Alvls of those items. (See the prefixes and suffixes pages.) You'll need to exceed the Alvl of an item to have it in the available modifier pool, though there is some randomization to the levels of items and modifiers when gambling (explained below).

There are also sweet spots, when good modifiers are available, but before additional modifiers become possible and dilute the odds of getting the good ones you want. If, for instance, the modifier you want on a glove is Alvl 50, and you notice that seven more modifiers become possible on gloves at Alvl 60, you'll have better odds of getting the modifier you want before the ilvls of items exceed 60. See the details on determining Alvl and ilvl further down this page.

How much gambling your character can do depends largely on how much gambling you want to do. Players who enjoy gambling pick up lots of gold stacks, specialize in gold find equipment, and make lots of trips to town to sell items. If you wish to specialize in Gold Acquisition it's not difficult. Learn which types of items sell for a lot of gold, practice making trips to and from town quickly, play in large games where more items will drop, kill lots of champions for their bonus sized gold drops, etc.

In addition to killing with gold find equipment, there are a few items that lower the cost of items from NPC merchants, including gambling costs. The Gheed's Fortune unique grand charm will cut from 5000-7500 gold off the price of a gambling a ring, and 6300-9450 gold off the price of gambling an amulet.

Items shown in the gambling window are always normal quality (with the exception of Coronets, which are technically exceptional, even though they have two upgrade types; Tiaras and Diadems). No one wants a normal item though (unless they've got a runeword in mind) so the real fun in gambling is hoping to score a higher quality item, ideally of exceptional or elite type.

These odds are unaffected by any other factor. Clvl, item type, players in the game, magic find, etc. Just gamble and cross your fingers.

The odds that item types will upgrade to exceptional and elite are more complicated to calculate. They depend on Clvl and ilvl. Higher level characters are more likely to get exceptional and elite items, and lower level items are more likely to upgrade to exceptional and elite. The formulas are as follows:

The process of determining which affixes (prefixes and suffixes) can occur on a given item in Diablo II is very complicated. Check out the Item Generation Tutorial for a full run down. The gist of the process is that items have an Item Level (ilvl) which the game uses to determine which affixes (based on their Alvl) can possibly appear on that item. From the valid pool of modifiers (based on item type and ilvl) it then selects one or more modifiers.

For item drops (by monsters or chests) the item's ilvl is determined by the monster's level, or the levle of the area in which the chest was found. For gambling, ilvl is determined by the level of the character gambling, with some randomness thrown in.

ilvl = Clvl +4/-5.

This means that the ilvl of the item will be somewhere between -5 and +4 the Clvl. Thus, when trying to gamble the Alvl 90 modifier that adds +2 to a character's skills on an amulet, there's a 10% chance of getting a ilvl 90 amulet at level 86, a 50% chance at level 90, and a 100% chance at level 95 and above.

Circlets add an oddity to this, with their mlvl. This is a bonus that makes all types of circlets get higher level affixes than other items gambled by the same character.

Circlets: 3

Coronets: 8

Tiaras: 13

Diadems: 18

Thus, a coronet gambled by a level 70 character would have at an ilvl of 65 - 74 and thus get bonuses as high as 73 - 82. To have a guaranteed chance at +2 skills (Alvl 90) when gambling coronets, a character would have to be 87 (87 - 5 + 8 = 90).

The level of your character determines, with some allowance for chance, which types of base items can be displayed in the gambling window. This is an important consideration for low and mid-level characters, but becomes irrelevant for higher level heroes. Past level 56, every type of item can appear in the gambling window, and it's sheer luck which do or do not on a given gamble (aside from rings and amulets, one of each will always appear).

This calculation affects only the types of base items available to gamble from. It does not factor into the modifiers that can be found on those items, which are also determined largely by a character's level. For instance, just because a level 60 Sorceress has a chance to see a coronet every time the gamble window loads, doesn't mean she can ever get +2 to all skills on a coronet she gambles (she can not, her clvl is much too low).

The calculation of which item types can appear is partially random, since when the item types are selected the game throws in a +4/-5 value on top of your Clvl, just to stir things up a bit. This has no effect on higher level characters, but can tweak things a bit for newer heroes.

Some item types are not available for gambling, and they are not listed in the following table.